Идея создания скрытного варианта истребителя Tejas Mk2 с внутренним отсеком для вооружения снова обсуждается в Индии

Edited by Raunak Kunde An idea that keeps resurfacing in Indian defence circles has come up again: could HAL build an interim stealth variant of the Tejas Mk2 — with a modified stealth-shaped outer fuselage and a small internal weapons bay — as an internal project with ADA’s help, to bridge the gap until the AMCA actually arrives? It’s a compelling concept on paper, and it isn’t entirely new either. This isn’t a brand-new suggestion. Back in 2012, then-DRDO chief V.K. Saraswat, speaking at an Aerospace Forum in Sweden, had floated something along similar lines — a more stealthy Tejas variant, which he referred to at the time as the Mk.3, that would integrate technologies being developed under the AMCA programme into the LCA airframe. The idea was to let AMCA-related stealth and systems work trickle down into an interim Tejas variant rather than sitting idle until the fifth-generation fighter matured. As is often the case with ambitious internal proposals in India’s defence ecosystem, it didn’t go anywhere concrete. Kindly note, the Tejas Mk2 as currently designed is already headed in a stealth-conscious direction, even without a dedicated internal bay. Programme officials have suggested the Mk2’s frontal radar cross-section could drop to roughly 0.1–0.2 square metres in clean configuration — a nearly 75 percent reduction from the Mk1A — through composite structures and stealth shaping, putting it in the same bracket as far more expensive Western 4.5-generation jets. The catch is that the Mk2 relies on 11 external hardpoints rather than an internal bay, so a fully loaded jet immediately gives back most of that radar-signature advantage. A dedicated stealth outer fuselage with even a small internal bay would address exactly that weak point — allowing a limited air-to-air or precision strike loadout to be carried without external stores spiking the RCS. This wouldn’t need to match AMCA-level internal capacity; even a modest bay for a couple of close-combat missiles or precision munitions would meaningfully change the aircraft’s signature profile for specific mission sets, particularly first-day-of-war or contested-airspace roles where the standard Mk2 configuration would be more exposed. That said, retrofitting an internal bay onto an airframe not originally designed around one is a nontrivial structural exercise — it typically demands reworking fuselage load paths, fuel tank placement, and undercarriage bay geometry, which is precisely why such proposals tend to get shelved in favour of the primary programme timeline. ADA and HAL’s institutional bandwidth is already fully committed to getting the baseline Tejas Mk2 to first flight and AMCA through its Development Phase, and stretching resources toward a parallel stealth-variant project risks delaying both. The proposal is intellectually sound and has genuine institutional precedent going back over a decade, but its biggest obstacle has never really been engineering feasibility — it’s organisational bandwidth and prioritisation. Unless it’s structured as a genuinely low-resource internal skunkworks effort running quietly alongside the main Mk2 and AMCA timelines, it risks facing the same fate as Saraswat’s original 2012 pitch: a good idea that nobody pursued.